Our last report of husband-penis-shearing before the most recent outbreak of this bizarre violence was the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case and that was on the night of June 23, 1993, nearly twenty years ago.

Since the beginning of the Second Wave Women’s Movement says Pinker, “the chance that a man would be killed by his wife, ex-wife, or girlfriend has fallen sixfold.”

Pinker ascribes the reason for the decline of violence by women against men to the same set of factors that account for the decline of violence against women. He explains.

Those countries in which women are better represented in government and in the professions, and in which they earn a larger proportion of earned income, are less likely to have women at the receiving end of spousal abuse. Also, cultures that are classified as more individualistic, where people feel they are individuals with the right to pursue their own goals, have relatively less domestic violence against women than the cultures classified as collectivist where people feel they are part of a community whose interests take precedence over their own.

And when women aren’t being abused or are being abused but have some degree of economic power and community support, they tend to leave rather than to kill

Feminism at home and global humanism is also responsible for this decline of domestic violence.

At the macro level, says Pinker, there is a consensus in the international community “that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world.” As it is at the top, so it also is on the street.

Even in those countries where women have the fewest rights, the people in a global poll expressed their belief that women should have more.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

-”Granted, any week that begins with news that a woman severed her husband’s penis and threw it down the garbage disposal is not the best week to report the decline of domestic woman-on-man violence.”

The case your referring to here is that of Catherine Kieu Becker which first broke on July 12th. The case that occurred earlier this week and that you linked to in the above quote is an entirely separate incident. There just happened to be a video featuring the Decker affair on the same page.

-”Our last report of husband-penis-shearing was the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case and that was on the night June 23, 1993, nearly twenty years ago.”

This is also incorrect. There have been many cases of “penis-Shearing” in the time between the two cases you cited. They just haven’t been publicized.

-”In his must-read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker explains that “feminism has been very good for men” in the domestic violence arena.

Since the beginning of the Second Wave Women’s Movement says Pinker, “the chance that a man would be killed by his wife, ex-wife, or girlfriend has fallen sixfold.”

To some extent this is true. Early second wave feminists were the first to raise widespread awareness of domestic violence which allowed policies and laws to be enacted and enforced to reduce said violence. However, many of the policies that have been enacted at the behest of womens advocates and feminist lobbyists, particularly over the past two decades, have been counterproductive. And While it is true that domestic violence has continued to decline over that period, evidence suggests this has larger been in *spite* of, not because of, said policies.(1)

With regards to domestic violence against men specifically. Males, who are one third to one half of all victims(2) end of getting victimized twice by a system which discriminates against them based on sex because of gendered, feminist backed legislation and policies such as VAWA. (1) And feminist backed researchers, and officials are absolutely intent on keeping things this way(3)

-”Pinker ascribes the reason for the decline of violence by women against men to the same set of factors that account for the decline of violence against women. He explains.

Those countries in which women are better represented in government and in the professions, and in which they earn a larger proportion of earned income, are less likely to have women at the receiving end of spousal abuse. Also, cultures that are classified as more individualistic, where people feel they are individuals with the right to pursue their own goals, have relatively less domestic violence against women than the cultures classified as collectivist where people feel they are part of a community whose interests take precedence over their own.”

This is just Pinker’s usual half-baked, politically-correct string of errors and ill-considered chains of cause and effect. By piling partial arguments on top of each other “intellectuals” like him create the illusion that some kind of logic is being used whereas all that is really happening is a foregone conclusion is pushed with cherry-picked and poorly-contextualised statements.

The entirety of his argument can be refuted with one simple statement:

correlation does not imply causation.

-”And when women aren’t being abused or are being abused but have some degree of economic power and community support, they tend to leave rather than to kill.”

This is a legitimate point. Although it’s really only applicable to women in third world nations. Women in the Anglosphere have ample economic independence and community support The question you should really be asking yourself is why the murder rate has come down so much more for men than it has for women. I think that based on my above assertion the answer is pretty self evident.(4)

-”Feminism at home and global humanism is also responsible for this decline of domestic violence.

At the macro level, says Pinker, there is a consensus in the international community “that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world.” As it is at the top, so it also is on the street.”

I find this view odd considering that globally and domestically it is *men* who constitute the majority of violent crime victims.

-”Even in those countries where women have the fewest rights, the people in a global poll expressed their belief that women should have more.

Islamic Countries Too

At least 90% of all people of both genders agreed with the proposition that women should have equal rights in the U.S., China, South Korea, Turkey, Lebanon and the countries of Europe and Latin American.

More surprisingly, 60 percent of both sexes in Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Kenya also agreed. According to Pinker, a global Gallup survey showed that “even in Islamic countries, a majority of women believe that they should be able to vote as they please, work at any job, and serve in government,” with most of the men in most of those countries also in agreement.

That these attitudes and the decreased violence that accompanies them are the result of radical changes in global culture since the mid-twentieth century can be demonstrated by a further recitation of statistics.”

See my comment above with regards to pinker.

-”But I’d rather give you a news article I recently ran across from a 1958 issue of the New York Times.”

And the contemporary correlate to this sort of thinking would be crackport theories like Hegemonic masculinity.(5) The unfortunate thing about this sort of bias is that now instead of applying it to women, now they apply it to men. Google the phrase “how to train your main dog” and you’ll see what I mean.

Thank you for calling my unfortunate error about the two incidents to my attention. If there have been further incidents of this nature I’d be interested in hearing about them. It is in all of our interests to support any cultural change that decreases violence.

I cannot repeat the considerable support for Pinker’s thesis here but isn’t it more important to celebrate the undeniable social good of increased freedom and autonomy for both genders? I assume you want maximum freedom of action, respect, and peaceful relations and would not deny the same to women.

That’s primarily what Pinker is saying here – our global attitudes about women’s civil rights are at a high point, even in countries that have miserable rights records. That’s progress worth celebrating, as is the decline of domestic violence against women in the western world. tIt is difficult for me to imagine that increased respect doesn’t also decrease maltreatment.

burntoutmillennial, regarding your statement: “This is also incorrect. There have been many cases of “penis-Shearing” in the time between the two cases you cited. They just haven’t been publicized,” Victoria didn’t say there weren’t other incidents, she said ”Our last report of husband-penis-shearing.” So you’re the one who’s incorrect.

You also said, “many of the policies that have been enacted at the behest of womens advocates and feminist lobbyists, particularly over the past two decades, have been counterproductive,” yet you don’t provide any proof they were counterproductive. Your comment appears to be patriarchal nonsense designed to prevent programs that help women gain equality with men.

And you said: “With regards to domestic violence against men specifically. Males… end of getting victimized twice by a system which discriminates against them.” You don’t provide evidence of the system discriminating against men, but police often ignore women’s domestic violence complaints and the women are murdered. There’s lots of evidence that men are physically more powerful and more violent against women, thus women on average have much more reason to fear their partner and suffer more severe injuries from domestic violence.

And as to why the murder rate has decreased more for men than for women, I don’t know exactly but women are close to a zero murder rate and at near zero there’s not much left to decrease. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports, “Males were almost 10 times more likely than females to commit murder in 2005,” so the main issue is that men commit a lot more murder than women. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/gender.cfm

However, you make an interesting point that you think it’s “odd” that there is “a consensus in the international community “that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world” because you say that “*men* …constitute the majority of violent crime victims.”

It depends on how one defines violence. Remember in Asia millions of female fetuses are killed and little girls are starved in preference for boy children. So patriarchy is responsible for these girls’ deaths. The international community needs to see that patriarchy is the worst human rights problem and not just violence against women, because the patriarchy causes a variety of problems like hurting the economy, destroying women’s and men’s human rights, suppressing education, etc.

Yet another news article falsely stating that women have completed most of our path to equality with men. In the U.S. as in virtually every other Western country vaunted as the best places for women to live, men overwhelmingly dominate politics, media, religion, sports, the arts, and the economy. They don’t just dominate, they overwhelmingly dominate. I believe the reason the male-dominated media keeps telling us this propaganda that women are one slim margin away from complete equality is to hide the fact of men’s overwhelming dominating us so that we are less upset by it, thus less likely to actually work for the mega-huge changes that are necessary for equality.

We live in a society where rape (a sexist crime regardless of the gender of the perpetrator or victim) happens constantly and is almost never punished, where children (mostly girls) are molested non-stop and almost never get rescued from the abuse, where overwhelmingly male-dominated Wall Street guts our country and gets away with it with bonuses and taxpayer bailouts because the ol’ boys’ club lets them, and the list goes on and on. We are so far away from gender equality that most people can barely imagine what it would be like. This is the patriarchy and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to society. When children stop getting raped then we know the patriarchy is gone.

When I visit the voting booth I vote to end the patriarchy. Which woman candidate are you voting for next to stop the patriarchy? Bless the women candidates who bravely challenge the Pedophile Patriarchy.

I feel your pain. I do, however, celebrate how far we’ve come to give hope to those women who can’t see the progress (or haven’t lived long enough to experience it). When we have hope and acknowledge what we have changed in the culture, in industry, in the professions, in the media and the like, we are renewed in our spirits to continue moving forward. This may just be a glass half empty/half full issue and I’ve been accused of being too sunny an optimist before. But violence is declining, women are enrolled in professional schools and Universities in greater numbers, and Gen-Y women have the opportunity to move into positions of leadership that were unthinkable when I was their age myself. I remember listening to Geraldine Ferraro speaking in a Sacramento public square in the heat of summer campaigning for Vice President of the United States. I was just beginning the practice of law at the time – a field then completely dominated by men. Tears were running down my cheeks, just to be in the presence of a woman candidate for so high a political office. As the Occupy Wall Street people say, we may not be working fast, but we’re working far.

First, my post was not about my pain, but the world’s pain. Second, I’m not complaining about your mentioning the extent patriarchy has eroded; I think it’s great that you did. Third, my complaint isn’t “a glass half empty/half full issue” but specifically against this false statement: “We’ve beat sexism in response to the strongest cultural forces possible. The rest, if we accept the challenge, should be a cakewalk.”

We have not beat sexism. Even in “advanced” Western society, men overwhelmingly dominate women in every major public institution which results in social ills such as rampant child molestation. Therefore, the rest of the way toward equality is not a “cakewalk” but a gargantuan, unbearably painful, long yet ultimately spiritually rewarding job. Reporters have an obligation to truthfully tell how far we are from ending patriarchy, not pretend most of the work is done.

Clearly, “we beat sexism,” in a context that suggests we don’t have further to go would be simply wrong (in the sense that it’s inaccurate and in the sense that we all have a moral obligation to live up to our stated principles of supporting equal rights for all.

The context in which this single sentence appears begins as follows: “We’ve got a long way to go, but our spirits will flag and our hearts turn rancorous if we do not recall just how far we’ve come. Because “how far we’ve come” teaches us that we should never despair.”

What I meant to communicate and what I’ll amend this piece to say is “We’ve beat some of the worst effects of sexism in response to the strongest cultural forces possible. The rest, if we accept the challenge, should be a cakewalk.

I continue to believe that closing the gap between idealism and reality “should be a cakewalk” if women step up to the plate an walk through the doors that are now open to us. Unfortunately, many of us have made the decision to opt out – some of it caused by the failure of industry to fully support women in leadership roles but some of it caused by our own lack of willingness to continue the fight for the full representation of women in all civil institutions and in all industries.

Thanks for writing. I learn as much from my readers about communicating my own views clearly as I do from the extensive reading I do myself between the covers of books and in the electronic media.

You’re not giving patriarchy enough credit. The patriarchy does more than fail “to fully support women in leadership roles.” It’s responsible for the planning, financing, and deployment of people to prevent women from gaining leadership roles. And it starts the process from the day a girl is born to steer her away from stepping up to the plate and walking through doors to equality.

Patriarchy is evil, therefore good (God) will destroy it. When a person promotes gender equality they are on the side of good; when a person promotes patriarchy they are on the side of evil. Because everyone has some sexist beliefs and acts on those beliefs, people constantly switch back and forth from good acts that decrease patriarchy and bad acts that increase patriarchy. When it’s all added up each person can be judged as having created a net gain (decrease in patriarchy) or a net loss (increase in patriarchy).

Some acts are worth more than others. For example, voting for a woman presidential candidate instead of her male competitor decreases patriarchy significantly more than voting for a woman city council member. It’s important we know the serious damage we do if we choose patriarchy when the stakes are high.

Thanks for your contributions to this discussion Nancy. I tend not to have such a black and white view of the world. It’s as impossible to wage a war against “patriarchy” as it is to wage a war against “terror.” These wars cast far too wide and vague a net. You are quite right about the problems created by our own implicit and explicit gender biases, both hostile and benevolent (i.e., patronizing). Some cultures actively attempt to silence and control every move their women make and others, like ours, have (mostly) unconsciously stereotyped both men and women into roles and behavior that unduly restrict their autonomy. I’m also not ready to vote for a woman against a man just because she’s a woman. I can think of many women on the political scene today who I do not believe would serve the interests of women as I view them. Because these women often have the support of other women, others obviously believe they do serve the interests of women because we have different views of what those interests are. I know many man who could be easily categorized as “anti-patriarchal” and many women who could just as easily be categorized as pro-patriarchal. So I look to the views an individual expresses rather than simply their gender in making political decisions.

> And when women aren’t being abused…… they tend to leave rather than to kill This statement tends to re-enforce by implication (if not by specific statement) the false notion that the only reason why women commit abuse…and even murder….is solely as a result of being abused. For all our talk about “gender equality” our society still refuses to accept a fundamental fact: women are violent, too. I see no evidence of how feminism has either addressed this issue or reduced its effects.